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Sam Harris Free Will Lecture | We Fucking Love Atheism | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Sam Harris Free Will Lecture
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well um it really is an honor to be here
such a beautiful venue and and uh to be
following the other horsemen it's it
really is it's great to be
here now I'm going to speak tonight
about the delusion of Free
Will and to my surprise this is an
incred incredibly sensitive subject it's
perhaps the most sensitive subject I
have had the U the honor to
touch U it's sensitive to religious
people of course because without Free
Will Judaism Christianity Islam don't
thing but the existence of Free Will is
actually a a very sensitive topic for
atheists as well because it seems to
touch everything human beings care about
it seems to touch everything in fact
that makes us distinctly human morality
and law and politics and religion and
intimate relationships feelings of
personal accomplishment feelings of
guilt and
responsibility it see it seems that most
of what we care about in human life
depends upon our being able to view
other people like ourselves as being the
the actual conscious source of their
actions so in this talk I I hope to do
two things I hope to convince you that
Free Will is an
illusion and I hope to convince you also
that that this matters and that's a uh
those are quite
distinct and I want to
begin I hope on not too defensive a note
by telling you the two ways the two most
common ways of misunderstanding my
argument and this is sort of like
beginning a marriage proposal by saying
here are the two most common reasons
women haven't wanted to marry
wrong now the first way of missing the
point is to think that we we simply
don't understand enough science is
incomplete some of our scientific assumptions
assumptions
may be false there may be truths to
discover about the the nature of the
universe that would put free will the
popular notion of free will on some new
footing so it's it's simply too soon to
say scientifically that Free Will is an
illusion th this is not true this is I
am arguing that Free Will as a concept
is is so incoherent that it can't be
the the the second detour you might be
tempted to take as many have is to say
well of course the popular notion of
Free Will doesn't make any sense it
doesn't fit the facts
facts
but n none of that matters that's an
academic argument we still feel free
this changes nothing it's sort of like saying
saying
that that
uh atoms are mostly empty space you know
this is this is not empty space we can
use nothing about our life changes you
know everything is mostly empty space
but I still can't fit into an old pair of
pants many people agree that Free Will
doesn't make any sense and that it's
some kind of Illusion but they think
that nothing important changes and and
that also on my view is
untrue imagine you're taking a nap in
the the Botanical Garden next door I
don't know if that's legal or not but
just imagine you do it and you you are
awakened by an unfamiliar sound and you
open your eyes and you see a large
crocodile about to seize your face in its
jaws stranger things have probably
happened it should be easy enough to see
that you have a
problem okay
and now swap the crocodile for a man
whole holding an
axe the problem changes in some
interesting ways but the the sudden
emergence of Free Will in the brain of
your attacker is not one of
them but imagine the difference between
these two experiences let's say you
survive your
ordeal and you you have a it's a
terrifying experience let's say you're
injured let's say you lose a
hand now imagine confronting your human
attacker on the witness stand during his trial
trial
okay if you're like most people you are
going to feel feelings of
hatred that could be so intense as to as
to constitute a further trauma you might
you might spend years of your life
fantasizing about this person's
death how much time are you going to
spend hating the
crocodile you might even go to the zoo
to to to take take your friends and
family to the zoo for fun just to look
at them you say that that is the Beast
that almost killed
me Al you might be pointing with with this
hand which which state of mind would you rather
rather
have now I I think this this idea of
Free Will largely accounts for the
difference the crocodile was just being a
a
crocodile what else was a crocodile
going to do coming upon you napping in the
the
park but this idea that that the human
had Free Will and could have done
otherwise and should have done
otherwise has very different
consequences now most people imagine
that a belief in Free Will is necessary
for Morality morality has to be grounded
in this idea and it's necessary
therefore for getting most of what we
want out of
life and I think that's clearly untrue
we I the the difference between
happiness and suffering uffing exists
with or without Free Will I I no more
want to be eaten by a crocodile than I
want to be killed by a man with an ax
these are both very good things to
avoid and we can and we can avoid them
and we can talk about almost everything
else we want in life without suffering
any obvious Illusions about the origins
behavior now the the popular conception
of Free Will seems to rest on two
assumptions okay the first is that each
of us was free to think and act
differently than we did in the past you
you chose a but you could have chosen B
you became a policeman but you could
have become a
firefighter you ordered chocolate or you
you but you could have ordered vanilla
it certainly seems to most of us this is
the world we're living
in now the the second assumption
is that you are the conscious source of
your thoughts and actions you're you you
feel that you want to move and then you
move your conscious desires and
intentions and thoughts that proceed
your actions seem to be their true
origin the conscious part of you that is
experiencing your inner life is actually
the author of your inner life and
yourself subsequent Behavior now
unfortunately we know that both of these
assumptions are
false the first problem is that we live
in a world of cause and
effect every thing that could possibly
constitute your will is either the
product of a long chain of Prior
causes and you're not responsible for
them or it's the product of
Randomness and you're not responsible
for that obviously or it's some
combination of the two and however you
turn this dial between the iron law of
determinism and mere
sense what does it mean to say that a
person acted of his own free
will okay it must mean that he could have
have
consciously done
otherwise not based on random influences
over which he had no no control but
because he as the the conscious author
of his thoughts and
actions could have thought and acted in
other ways now the problem is that no
one has ever described a way in which
mental and physical events could arise
that make sense of this
claim consider you're a generic murderer
okay his his choice to commit his last
murder was preceded by a long series of
Prior causes a certain pattern of
Electro chemical activity in his
brain which was the product of Prior
causes some combination of bad genes and
the the developmental effects of an unhappy
unhappy
childhood whatever influences were
impinging upon him the day he committed
his crime the moment we catch sight of
this stream of causes that that that
precede any conscious experience and
reach back into childhood and Beyond or
world the sense of his culpability
disappears that the place where we would
place our blame
disappears to say that he would he could
have done
otherwise is really to
say he would have been in a different
Universe had he been in a different
universe or that he would have been a
different person had he been a different
person now and as disturbing as I might
find such a person's Behavior here I
have to admit that if I would if I were
to trade places with him Adam for Adam I
would be
him and I would I would behave exactly
as he did and for the same reasons there
there's no extra part of me that could
people I even if you believe that every
human being Harbors an immortal Soul
this this problem of responsibility
remains I cannot take credit for the
fact that I don't have the soul of a
psychopath if I had truly been in this
person's shoes if I had an identical
brain or or an identical soul in an
identical State I would have behaved
exactly as he
did so so the role of luck in our lives appears
appears
decisive one has to be very unlucky to
have the mind and brain or soul of a psychopath
psychopath
but the moral significance of luck is
very difficult to admit it seems to
completely destabilize us it's a we seem
not to know how to think about evil in this
this
context and yet in in specific cases we
have already changed our view of evil
whenever whenever we see the cause of
someone's behavior when we see for
instance that a a murderer had a brain
tumor and the brain tumor was in just
such a place in the brain so as to to
explain his violent
impulses that person suddenly becomes a
biology our moral intuitions shift
utterly now I'm arguing that a brain
tumor is just a special case of physical
events giving rise to thoughts and
actions if we if we fully
understood the neurophysiology of any
murderer's brain
it would be as exculpatory as finding a
tumor in
it if we could see how the wrong genes
were being relentlessly transcribed if
we could see how his his early life
experience had sculpted the micr
structure of his brain in just such a
way as to give rise to to Violent
impulses the the the whole conception of
placing blame on him would
erode now of course this is a problem
that scientists and philosophers are
aware of and many think they have put
forward a a notion of free will that can
that can uh withstand the
um the facts and I'll deal with some of
that there appears to be a poltergeist
in this computer
computer
um but I want to I want to argue for a
moment that the the problem of Free Will
is actually deeper than the problem of
cause and effect I mean most people
think we have this this experience of Free
Free
Will and simp we simply we can't map it
on to physical
reality I think this is an illusion the
the the Free Will doesn't even
correspond to a subjective fact about
ourselves and if you pay close attention
to your experience you can see
this your your thoughts simply appear in
Consciousness very much like my
words what what do you going to think
next what am I going to say
next I could I could start just
wondering about why we don't eat
owls why don't we eat owls they seem perfectly
perfectly
good where did that come from well as
far as you're concerned it came out of
nowhere right but the same thing happens
in the privacy of your own
out you've all made an effort to be here
tonight presumably because you wanted to
hear what I had to say about free will
and you're you're trying to listen to
me but you have a voice in your head
that just says
noticed now I'm standing up here trying
to reason with
you and
[Applause]
Stiller I was hoping I didn't look that
still thoughts just emerge in
Consciousness okay we we are not authoring
authoring
them we we can't think them we can't
choose them before we think them that
would require that we think them before
them if you can't control your next
thought and you don't know what it's
going to be until it
will now at this moment some of you are
thinking what the hell is he talking
about here's what I'm talking about you
didn't choose that thought either
if if you're confused by what I'm saying
you didn't create that
state conversely if you if you
understand what I'm saying and you find
it interesting you
didn't create that
either everything is just
happening and that includes your
thoughts and intentions and desires and
efforts we will come back to that
point now of course in a sense your
brain our brains do think our thoughts
before we think them and they think many
things that we never hear
about where we're conscious of only a
tiny fraction of what goes on in in our
minds and we we continually notice
changes in our experience in thoughts
and intentions and moods and resulting
Behavior but we are utterly unaware of
the the neurophysiological changes that
that produce
those those those
changes me consider the sensation of of
touching your finger to your
nose okay feel free to try this it seems
simultaneous it seems like the nose
touches the finger at the same time the
finger touches the nose okay and and
while it may be simultaneous in the in
the world we know at the level of the
brain the timing has to be different it
simply takes longer for the input from
the fingertip to reach sensory cortex
than it does from the nose and this is
true no matter how short your arms or
nose so the experience of the present
moment even of the simplest sensation is
built upon layers of unconscious
processing that we're not aware of okay
so so even the Apparently simple
conscious events are not entirely what
they seem that the the present moment is
in some sense already a
buffered now needless to say this
unconscious M
Machinery produces not only our
perceptions but our thoughts intentions actions
actions
decisions and this is where the notion
of Free Will and moral responsibility
begin to get
squeezed now many people have
demonstrated in a
lab in many Labs actually that that a
person's conscious decision
comes after processes that can be
detected and there's a there's a time
lag between the moment you think you've
decided to do something and the moment
at which your brain
decided and this has been proven
Benjamin leet did this with EEG and this
has been done with fmri and and actually
direct recordings from the the the
cortices of of patients under about to
undergo surgery we know
that the even the simplest most
apparently voluntary decision like the
decision to move your left hand versus
your right hand or the decision to to
push the left button or the right button
uh when you put people in this Paradigm
and you have them watch a clock a
special clock that allows them to
discriminate just you know very fine
increments of time and you ask them
simply to to make the choice to move
whenever they want to they can move
their left hand or the right hand just notice
notice
when it what time it was on the clock
when you finally were aware of which
course you were going to take we know
that that some moments half a second
sometimes as much as 5
seconds before a person is consciously
aware of what they're going to do we can
see in the brain what they were
committed to doing so the the experience of
of
deciding is during this period where you
still feel that you're free to do
anything you want has already been
determined by the state of your
brain so needless to say this time lag
is very difficult to reconcile with free
will because in principle it would allow
someone to predict what you're going to
do while you still think you're making
up your mind but the truth is that even
if there were no time lag even if the
conscious intention were truly
simultaneous with the neurophysiological
underpinnings there would still be no
room for free will because you still
wouldn't know why it is you do what you
do in that
moment and again you can notice this
fact about yourself
directly let's run a little
experiment think of a film any film it
doesn't matter a good one a bad
one and notice what your conscious
process of selection is like notice
first that you're you're this is as free
a decision as you're ever going going to
get I me you you have all the films in
the world to choose from and I've simply
one do everybody have a
film I'm sorry to say you've all picked
the wrong film so don't ask me how I
know that but I
do do it again pick another film and and
just be sensitive to what the the
like do you see any evidence for free will
there let's let's look for it it first
if it's not here it's not anywhere so we
here first let's rule out all of those
films whose names you don't know and
which you haven't seen and which you
couldn't have possibly thought of if
your life depended on it okay there's no
freedom in that obviously
but then there are all these other films
which you're perfectly aware
of but which simply didn't come to
Consciousness you you absolutely know
that the Wizard of Oz is a film but you
just didn't think of The Wizard of
this were you free to
choose that which did not occur to you to
to
choose for for whatever reason reason
your your Wizard of Oz circuits were not
primed in such a way as to deliver it as a
possibility of course if you did think
of The Wizard of Oz you should consider
genius okay so you probably thought of several
several
films and let's say you thought
of Lawrence of Arabia and Avatar and Mad
Max okay so you kind of converged on
those three and then you thought well
I'm Australian I'll go with Mad Max and
then you thought no no M Gibson is more
than a little creepy at this point in his
his
life so I'm going to go with
Avatar okay and you settled on Avatar
well well you still don't know why you
chose Avatar over Lawrence of
Arabia and and this is the this is the
sort of decision that motivates the idea
of free will you go back and forth
between two options and you're not
suffering any obvious constraints from
the external world or any coercion it
just you appear to be doing all of it
thoughts but when you look close closely
this is it is a mystery why you chose
one over the other and you you might
have a story to tell about it you might
say well I saw an animated movie last
week and Avatar is animated so I I
remembered that and so I just went with
Avatar okay the first thing to say is
that we know that those sorts of
explanations are almost always wrong
when you bring people into the lab and manipulate
manipulate
their decisions they always have a story
about why they did what they did and it
never Bears any relationship to what
actually influenced them so you you can
bring people into the lab and and give
them a hot beverage as opposed to a cold
one to hold in their hands and get them
to cooperate more or to like one person
more than another and they have no idea
that the the temperature of the cup in
their hands is influencing them at all
that psychology is just bursting with
with evidence of that
kind but even if you're right in this
case even if even if the memory of the
animated film was the thing that steered
you to Avatar over Lawrence of Arabia
you still can't explain why it had that
effect Why didn't it have the opposite
effect why didn't why didn't you think
well I I just saw an animated film so
I'm going to go with something else I'll
Arabia the the thing to notice about
this is that that you the conscious
witness of your inner life isn't making these
these
decisions all you can do is witness these
decisions you you no more picked a film
in the subjective sense than you would
have if I picked it for you I I could
have been saying Star Wars Hannah and
Her Sisters the these these names were
just appearing in Consciousness there
was this first moment where I said pick
a film
and nothing had happened then all of a
sudden the names of films started coming
to you and you didn't know which they
appeared so I'm arguing to you that that
our experience in life is actually
totally compatible with the truth of
determinism we don't have this robust
sense of free will the moment we
actually pay attention to how thoughts
and intentions arise
and again it's important to notice that
this is true whether or not we have
Immortal Souls and there's no the case
I'm building against Free Will does not
presuppose philosophical materialism I'm
not the idea that reality is just entirely
physical no doubt most of reality is
entirely physical and most of mind is is
produced by physical changes in our
brains we know that the brain is a
physical system that's en IR L beholden
to the laws of nature but even if we have
have
souls that are somehow Loosely
integrated with the
brain the unconscious operation of a
soul grants you no more free will than
the unconscious neurophysiology of your brain
brain
does if you don't know what your soul is
going to do next you are not in control
soul and this is rather starkly obvious
when you think of all of the people who
do things they wish they hadn't done I
me think of the the millions of of
Christians whose Souls just happen to be
gay but it's true even when you do
exactly what you wish you had done in
hindsight the soul that allows you to
stay on your diet is just as mysterious
as the soul that tempts you to eat
okay so I think it's safe to say that no
one has ever argued for the existence of
free will because it holds such promise
as an abstract idea the the the
endurance of this problem in science and
philosophy is the result of of this
feeling that most of us have that we
freely author our thoughts and
actions and at the moment the only
philosophically respectable way to
defend Free Will is to adopt a view in
academic philosophy that's called
compatibilism and argue that that that
Free Will is compatible with the truth of
determinism now my my friend Dan dennet
is a the philosopher is a is a
compatibilist and he essentially makes the
the
claim that we just have to think about
Free Will differently free if if if a
murderer commits his crime based on his
desire to kill and not based on some
other thing that's high Jack in him but
his actions are actually an expression
of his real desires and intentions well
then that's all the free will you
need but from both a a moral and
scientific point of view this seems to
miss the
point but where is the freedom in doing
what one
wants when one when one's desires are
the product of Prior
events that one is completely unaware of
so from my point of view compatibilism
is a little like saying a puppet is free
strings now compatibilists push back
here they say that that even if our
desires and thoughts and behavior are
the product of unconscious causes that
doesn't matter because you're you're you
are the totality of what goes on inside
your brain and body so your your
unconscious mental mental life is just
as much
you and your unconscious neurophysiology
is just as much you as your conscious
inner life
is okay but this to my eyes seems like a
bait and switch okay this this trades a
psychological fact this experience we
have of consciously authoring our
thoughts and actions for a a general
conception of ourselves as persons it's
it's a little like saying you made made
of Stardust okay which you are but you
don't feel like
Stardust and and and the the knowledge
that you're Stardust is not driving your
moral intuitions and influ influencing
our our system of Criminal
Justice the the fact is that most people
are identified with a certain channel of
information in their conscious minds
they feel that they are in
control they are the source
and this is an
illusion the the you that you take
yourself to be in this present
anything so compatib try try to save
Free Will by by saying you're more than
this you are the totality of what goes
on inside your brain and body but you're making
making
decisions right now with with organs
other than your brain
but you don't feel responsible for these
decisions are you making red blood cells right
right
now your body is doing this hopefully
but if it if it were to stop you
wouldn't be responsible for this you
change so so to say that that you are
responsible or or or are identical
to everything that goes on inide your
brain and body is to make a claim about
you that bears absolutely no
relationship to the experience of
conscious authorship and subjectivity
that has made free will a problem for
place so what what does all this all
mean well first let me tell you what it
doesn't mean it's it to to talk about
determinism as a fact is not to
argue for
fatalism okay this this confusion on
this point gives rise to questions like
well if everything is
determined why should I do anything why
not just sit back and see what happens
why not just throw the ores out of the
boat and just drift through
life this this misses the point this is
not to to sit back and see what happens
is itself a choice which has its own
consequences it's also very hard to do
just you just try to stay in bed all day
waiting for something to
happen Okay you you'll soon feel a a
very strong urge to get up and do
something and the only way to stay in
bed at that point will be to resist this
urge doing nothing actually becomes much
harder than doing something after a very short
time so the fact that our choices and
decisions and efforts depend upon prior
causes doesn't mean that they're not
important if I hadn't decided to write a
book about free will it wouldn't have
written itself you you can't write a
book by accident okay so so effort and
discipline and intention all of this matters
goals these are all causal states of the
brain and they lead to behaviors and
behaviors lead to outcomes in the
world so the so on one level not much
changes the the choices we make in life
are as important as fanciers of Free Will
imagine and then therefore fatalism is
untrue that the idea that the future is
going to be what it's going to be
regardless of what you think and do that
untrue but the next thing you
think and
do is going to come out of a wilderness
of Prior causes which you you the
conscious witness of your inner life cannot
cannot
being you have not built your
mind and in the moments where you seem
to build it when you make a an effort to
learn something when you try to perfect a
a
skill the only tools at your disposal
are those that that you've inherited
from moments
past no one picks their
parents or the society into which they were
were
born no one picks the moment in history
where they
arrive no one determines how their
nervous system gets shaped from the
onward so you are no more responsible
for the the structure of your
brain as well as its functional States
as you are for your height
but I'm not saying that you can just
blame your parents for every bad thing
that happens to you and make no effort
to change yourself this is a a way of
misunderstanding the argument it is
possible to change in fact viewing
yourself as a system open to Myriad
influences actually makes change seem more
more
possible I mean you you are by no means
condemned to be the person you were
yesterday in fact you can't be that
person that the self is not a stable
entity it it is a
process but it is a fundamentally mysterious
process I me none of us know how we
arrived at this moment in our
lives there there is actually a mystery
here in the present moment that doesn't
get eradicated even though you have a
story to tell about why you think you
did something
we are we are in each moment simply
discovering what our life
is now this may sound scary to some of
you but it actually can be quite free to
way so our choices
matter and there are paths toward making
wiser ones there there's no telling how
much a a a good conversation could
change you or how much it might matter
to you to surround yourself with smart
but you don't choose to choose what you
choose in life there's a
regress that always ends in darkness you
have to take a first step or a last one
for reasons that are are bound to remain
inscrutable and to declare your freedom
in this
context is really just a way of saying I
don't know why I did that but I didn't
mind doing it and I'd be willing to do
now I don't mean to belabor the point
but people have a a really hard time
understanding this just think of the
context in which you are going to make
decision whatever it is a decision of
any size whether to get married or not
to go to graduate school or not to eat
one your brain is making choices based upon
upon
beliefs and intentions and states that
have been hammered into
it over a
lifetime your physical development is
something you had no hand in you didn't
pick your parents you didn't pick your
genes you didn't pick any of the
influences that's that shaped your
neurophysiology you didn't pick your
soul if you have
one and yet this totality of influences
and states will be the thing that
produces your next
decision yeah yes you are free to do
whatever you want but where do your
from okay so let's get back to this
issue that I raised at the beginning of this
this
talk it seems that this kind of talk
begins to
undermine a sense of of moral order and
in fact this is the position of the
Supreme Court of the United States has
said that Free Will is just a
non-starter in terms of our our Criminal
Justice System it is it
is a universal and persistent assumption
that's a quote of our criminal justice
system and determinism is incompatible
with with the underlying precepts of our
approach to justice so the idea is
actually doing work in our
world the problem is that if we view
people as neuronal weather patterns it
seems to undermine a basis for for
placing blame now I think this is
actually a false assumption I think we
can have a a very strong sense of
morality and an effective criminal
justice system without lying to
ourselves about the causes of human
behavior so what do we condemn most in
people morally and
legally it's the conscious intention to
do harm now why is the conscious
intention to harm people so BL worthy
well Consciousness is the context in
which all of
our all the qualities of our minds
seem activated the Consciousness is
where our beliefs and desires and
prejudices rub up against one another
what you do on the on the basis of
conscious premeditation tends to say the
most about you and about what you're
likely to do in the
future if you decide to kill your
neighbor after weeks of
deliberation and Library
research and debate with your
friends well then killing your neighbor
really says a lot about you that really
are the the point is not that you are
the sole independent cause of your
behavior the point is for whatever
reason you have the mind of a
murderer okay you're not ultimately
responsible for the fact that you have
that mind no more so than a a crocodile
is responsible for the fact that it has
a that it's a
crocodile but a crocodile really is a
crocodile and it really will eat you
okay if you see one out on the boardwalk
tonight it it's worth taking
seriously you don't have to attribute
free will to it to take it
seriously now certain criminals are
obviously more dangerous than crocodiles
and we have to lock them up to keep
everyone else safe now the moral
justification for this is entirely
straightforward everyone is better off that
that
way but and that still makes sense
without Free Will what doesn't make
sense is the motive of Retribution the
motive of punishing someone because they
sense we don't P punish
crocodiles because they deserve
it in fact that hasn't always been true
it says in Exodus that if if a o an ox
Gores a person and kills him or her the
ox has to be stoned to death and it's
meat can't be eaten and in fact for
hundreds of years in medieval Europe
Christians held trials for animals that harm
harm
people these animals were actually
defended by lawyers
okay there there were actually there are
cases of there's a case of I just read
about of a lawyer who was representing a
large collection of
rats that had destroyed a a
crop and his argument to the magistrate
was the rats couldn't appear in court
because there were so many cats about
that were were going to do them
Mischief so his client was was
absent okay this this is this went on
for 100 of years we we l we've lynched
there was the latest lynching of an
animal in the United States was in in
1916 where an elephant ran a muck out of
a traveling circus trampled someone in
the street and the good people of
Tennessee decided to Lynch it to get
Justice they they hung an elephant from
a railroad
Crane and they were quite satisfied with
themselves so it's it's you can see that
I mean that those facts are are maob and
and and comical now you can see how
we're prone to illusions on this
front now I'm not ruling out the
possibility that certain punishments may
be necessary to regulate people's
behavior it may be that certain crimes
require punishment in order to be
deterred but that is that is a a purely
pragmatic discussion about human
psychology and and the causal efficacy
of punishment it has nothing to do with with
retribution dispensing with the illusion
of Free Will allows us to focus on
things that actually matter like
mitigating harm deterring crime assessing
assessing
risk so I'm not arguing that everyone's
Not Guilty by reason of insanity there
there are the bad people need to be
locked up if that's all we can do to
keep ourselves safe
and all the distinctions we care about
the difference between voluntary and
involuntary action or the or the the the
moral responsibilities of an adult
versus those of a child all of those can
Will in the United States we have
13-year-olds serving life sentences for
crimes I don't know if this happens in
Australia but this happens in the US and
it's not it it's not based on any kind
of Saye assessment that these children
cannot be rehabilitated it is based on
the sense that they deserve this
punishment they are the true cause the
sole cause of their behavior which was so
so
heinous that they deserve this as a
matter of Retribution that doesn't make
will I me the the thing you you have to
admit Adit in the final analysis is that
even the most terrifying
people are at bottom unlucky to be who they
they
are and that has moral
significance and once again even if you
think everyone Harbors an eternal Soul
the game doesn't
change anyone who has who's been born
with the soul of a psychopath is profoundly
profoundly
unlucky you take one of the most OD
people I can think
of Saddam Hussein's eldest son UD
Hussein he really is somebody who's it's
almost impossible to feel compassion for
this man when you think of him as he was
as a man I mean this was somebody who
when he would see a a
wedding in progress in Baghdad would
descend with his thuggish bodyguards and
rape the bride sometimes he would rape
and kill the bride he did this more than
once so so given that we couldn't
capture him during the course of that
war whatever you think about the ethics
of the
war it was good that we killed him me
unless you are a total
pacifist you have to admit that this is
what guns are for to shoot people like UD
Hussein but but simply walk back the
timeline of his life think of him as a a
four-year-old boy okay he might have
been a his psychopathy might have been
evident even at at the age of four he
might have been a scary boy but he was
also a very unlucky boy he he he had
Saddam Hussein as a
father how unlucky can you
get okay he was the he was the
four-year-old boy who was going to
become the psychopath UD Hussein through
no fault of his own ultimately if if at
any point in his life course
we could have intervened to help him at
4: at 5 at 6 at 7 at
8 that would have been the right thing
to do and compassion would have been the right
right
motive so so the irony is if you want to
be like
Jesus and love your enemies or or at
least not hate them one way into that is to
to
view human behavior through the lens of
causation now I'm not saying that it
would be easy to adopt this perspective
if you or someone close to you was the
victim of a violent crime this is this
is how we need to see the world in our
more dispassionate moments but our
dispassionate moments are the source of
our thinking about public policy and
to to see how fully our moral intuitions
should shift imagine if we had a cure
for evil imagine that we we understand
exactly what psychopathy and all its variants
variants
are and we can we can make the necessary
changes in the brain painlessly and
safely and easily it's just we can just
drop the Cure into the milk like vitamin
D okay so now at that point evil is a
nutritional deficiency
now imagine the logic the moral logic of
withholding the cure for evil from
someone as a punishment for their evil
acts but would it make any sense at all
to say now this person was so evil he
was so bad he caused so much
harm that he shouldn't be given the
Cure does that make any sense at all
that imagine withholding surgery from
someone who has a brain
tumor as a
punishment when you are sure that the
brain tumor was the cause of their violent
Behavior to my eye that makes no sense
at all and that
reveals that this urge for
Retribution is actually born of not
seeing the causes of human behavior when
you see the causes if we could trace the
causes in a fine grained
way this notion of of
Vengeance and and this notion that
people deserve what they get in this
disappear and this leads me finally to
the subject of religion because of
course the the notion of God's justice
is entirely a matter of Retribution
people deserve what they get
because based on their own free will
they are misbehaved I me this is the
religious answer to the problem of evil
the only when you say well why did the
not how did an omnipotent and Omni
benevolent God allow the Nazis to kill
millions of people the answer is well
human beings are endowed with Free Will
and therefore God couldn't control that
part now obviously that's not an answer
to all the other mayem that's born of
other causes so tsunamis and epidemic
Disease an omnipotent God seems
responsible for those things but the the
religious answer to the problem of human
Will Free Will is what makes sense of
the idea of sin that this idea that that
people can
consciously as the sole cause of their
behavior and belief turn away from
God I must be the sole sufficient cause
okay this this can't be
true this is this is a not only can this
not be true because beliefs are the are
born of all of these prior
causes I can't actually be the cause of my
my
unbelief it it seems impossible to
describe a universe in which it could be true
and however you tune the variables of of
of determinism and
Randomness Free Will doesn't put in an
appearance there's no there's no mix of
Randomness and determinism that gets you free
free
will now ironically one one of the fears
that religious people have is that this
way of viewing the world dehumanizes us
but rather I think it humanizes
us what could be more dehumanizing than
to say that that most people throughout
human history are in some crucial way
responsible for the fact that they were
born at the wrong time to the wrong
parents given the wrong
beliefs given the wrong religion the
wrong intellectual influences and as a
result of that they deserve to be
punished for
eternity and that and the god that
designed this diabolical apparatus is
somehow still
good so to conclude I just want to bring
this back to to the direct experience of
Consciousness in the present
moment it's generally argued that that
Free Will presents us with a compelling
mystery we have this robust experience
of freedom and yet we can't figure out
how to map it on to physical
reality I'm arguing that's not the case
I think this is a a a symptom of our
confusion the the illusion of free will
on my on my account is itself an
Will thoughts and intentions simply
do now some of you might think this sounds
sounds
depressing but it's actually in
incredibly freeing to see life this way
it it does take something away from Life
what it takes away from life is an
egocentric view of
life now we're not truly separate we are
linked to one another we are linked to
the world we are linked to our past and to
to
history and what we do actually
matters because of that linkage because
of the permeability because of the fact
that we can't be the true Locus of
responsibility that's what makes it all
matter so you can't take credit for your
talents but it really matters if you use
them you can't you can't really be
blamed for your weaknesses and your
failings but it matters if you correct
them pride and shame don't make a lot of
sense in the final
analysis but they were no fun
anyway these are these are isolating
emotions but what what does make sense
are things like compassion and love try
caring about well-being makes
sense trying to maximize your well-being
and the well-being of others makes
sense there is still a a a difference
between suffering and happiness and love
consists in wanting those we love to be
happy all of that still make sense
without Free
Will and of course nothing that I've
said makes social and political Freedom
any less valuable having a gun to your
head is still a problem worth rectifying
wherever intentions come from so so so
the freedom to do what one wants is still
precious but but the idea that we as
conscious beings are deeply responsible
I think needs to be
revised it just can't be mapped on to
reality neither objective nor
subjective and if we're going to be
guided by
reality rather than by the fantasy lives
of our
ancestors I think our view of ourselves
needs to
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